Between the years 2009 and 2013, there was a 40 percent drop in teen pregnancies in Colorado as well as a 42 percent decrease in abortions, especially in the poorest regions of the state. How exactly did the Centennial State achieve such remarkable results?

The administration of Twin Peaks Charter Academy High School in Longmont, Colo., prevented 2015 class valedictorian Evan Young from giving his graduation speech after learning he would announce he is gay. Two weeks later he made his speech to an audience of hundreds. “Democracy Now!” airs Young’s full address and speaks with him about the experience.

Since Colorado voters legalized marijuana in 2012, more states and cities have been considering a similar path. At the same time, the cannabis market is looking less like a music festival and more like a Silicon Valley confab—upscale, data-driven and focused on investors.

Officers with the Denver Police Department deleted bystander footage that showed them beating David Flores and knocking his pregnant girlfriend to the ground. Fortunately, the segment was sent to a remote digital storage network known as a cloud, and the horrific event is preserved for all to see.

“Don’t make history a mystery” read one of the signs at a rally in Jefferson County, Colo. High-school students in this suburban district, referred to locally as “JeffCo,” have been walking out of class en masse this past week, protesting the planned censorship of the district’s Advanced Placement (AP) United States history curriculum by the local school board.

No matter how serious the issue, the political class seems pathologically determined to present everything as a fun-and-games, red-versus-blue battle whose only important consequences have to do with the next election.

Seven years before legal marijuana went on sale this month in my home state of Colorado, the drug warriors in President George W. Bush’s administration released an advertisement that is now worth revisiting.

If you’ve read David Brooks’ column about weed, in which The New York Times scribe presents himself as a once-cool kid who got wise and found more fulfilling and morally sound pleasures in the conservative movement, then you know it’s begging to be made fun of.

Environmentalists and state inspectors are trying to track thousands of oil and gas wells, pipelines and fracking storage tanks to determine the scope of impairment from the region’s massive floods. “They’re just overwhelmed,” one expert says.

The Obama administration’s unprecedented acknowledgement that four Americans were killed in U.S. drone strikes overseas—including one whose death was not previously reported—“raises more questions than it answers,” Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation and author of the new book “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” told “Democracy Now!” on Thursday.

Recent mass shootings have rightly sparked a national debate about gun control. Unfortunately, like so many political debates, this one has been loud, divisive and lacking in substantive analysis or reasoned compromise.

This is the microcosmic lesson of the University of Colorado’s recent decision to pay a new football coach $2 million a year. The move - and the reaction to it - is a perfect illustration of America’s values, or lack thereof.

A look at the day’s political happenings, including President Obama’s take on the Michigan “right to work” battle and the Republican National Committee’s attempt to figure out what went wrong in the 2012 election.

Adults will be able to legally smoke marijuana beginning Thursday in Washington state. However, officials there are concerned about the lack of guidelines from the Department of Justice given that the federal government still considers the drug illegal.

What’s next? Amid all the munchie-themed jokes from reporters, political elites and late-night comedians, this remains the overarching question after Coloradans voted overwhelmingly to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in the same way alcohol is already legalized, regulated and taxed.

A Guardian survey of six swing states finds new voter registration markedly down from 2008 levels, particularly among Democrats. A lack of enthusiasm could be to blame, as could the nationwide effort by Republican-controlled state legislatures to make it more difficult to vote.

President Obama has defanged the military, gave his first interview to Muslim journalists and “seeks to purposefully bankrupt and bring about the downfall of America,” fans of Mitt Romney argued at a campaign event Monday.